I’ve been an Intuit user for years. Quicken, Quickbooks, and even TurboTax (because my taxes are simple–a CPA is better for most of my readers). One thing I never do, though, is sign up for the automatic renewal. I can usually find a deal somewhere on TurboTax and so I prefer to buy it when I’m ready. Last year when I purchased the product and did our taxes, I carefully selected to “opt out” of the automatic renewal.
Imagine my surprise when I got a letter from Intuit announcing that my automatically renewed product would soon be available. I immediately went to the company site and changed the settings (which were wrong) to delete the automatic renewal.
A couple of weeks later, I got an email stating that the product would be ready within days, and when it was my card would be charged and I could download the product. I tried to call the customer service number, but it was after hours, so I, after digging through the Intuit site for hours, resorted to again deleting my info and canceling the auto renewal. I received an email confirmation to this effect.
To be sure, I also posted a question on the Intuit forums, under the Customer Service heading. That resulted in someone else posting that they were in the same boat, then the moderator writing, I’m not making this up:
The forums are for people to help each other. We don’t have the necessary information or tools to help you with situations like this. Please Contact our sales and service team via the shopping and account info link here…
What, pray tell, is the purpose of a Customer Service Forum if you won’t serve your customers?
It doesn’t matter, the story gets worse from here.
Today, I got an email announcing that my auto-renewed product is ready for download.
What the…?
I called the customer support number. Customer service is only available between 8am and 4pm PST, so I thought I might actually get someone with the company. Nope. Some poor Indian wage slave had to deal with a terribly irate me. Imagine trying to get someone who can barely speak English to understand “Burns-Dell’Acqua” as a name. Ugh.
This poor shloob did understand English well enough to say that my account had never been canceled. When I said I had email proving it, he tried to say that I must have made a mistake. This went on for some time. Finally, he said that he would cancel everything AND send me an email confirming that. I was to receive the email withing 2 hours of the call.
That was 6 hours ago and counting.
Well, guess what I’m now advising my clients? Stay away from Intuit products.
Makes ya wann scream your head off and send a lettter to the CEO, huh? Been there didn’t do that but wanted to. Maybe send a link of this blog to the CEO? Free Quicken renewals for life, except that for some reason now the computer keeps deleting your account.
I’m not sure I’d call it bad marketing, more like bad customer care or execution. Still bad biz all the same.
I hear ya, Leslie!
Truth be told, I could never wrap my brain around QuickBooks. Wasn’t the first accounting program where I had this problem.
Then I switched accountants. She wanted no part of QuickBooks, and boy, was I relieved.
But in order to deal with her, I had to start keeping my own books. She said that it would be good for me and good for my business. Both things have turned out to be true, but it took about seven months to get the hang of using accounting software.
The software she set me up on is called MYOB, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Much more intuitive than that program from Intuit.